Briseyda Barrientos Ariza

Briseyda Barrientos Ariza is a Guatemalan American doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where she studies Central American orature. Her research explores how orature and its practice throughout the Central American isthmus and multi-directional diaspora function twofold as a collective de-nationalized revolutionary space comprised of multiple cultural agents and a rhetorical (method)ology that directly opposes colonial narratives, allowing for alternative texts to emerge outside the page. Other research interests include Central American isthmus and diaspora, film, sonic art, archival studies, performance studies, resistance studies, decolonial theory, Black and Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, third perspectives, opacity, politics of temporality and memory, cultural autonomy, and sonic- territories and imaginations. Barrientos Ariza is a 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellow, and a Graduate Fellow at Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM).